French

Postgraduate Modules

We currently offer the following postgraduate modules:

FR852: Studies in Autobiography

The notion of autobiography as a documentary genre, in which the writer unproblematically records the facts of his or her life, has been called into question by modern critical studies of the genre, many of the most important theorists of autobiographical writing insisting upon its central place in the literary canon, alongside plays, novels, and poems, with which it would share a certain 'literariness'. Focusing on a wide range of modern autobiographical texts from different national and linguistic cultures, this module treats questions of generic definition, form, motivation, and rhetorical strategy. Among the questions to be considered are: Can autobiography be strictly defined? How does autobiography relate to other literary genres such as the diary or the first-person novel? Is autobiography a particular kind of narrative? Is there an identifiable rhetoric of autobiography? Is sincerity a meaningful criterion when considering autobiography? What kinds of relationship do autobiographers attempt to establish with their readers? We also consider some of the recurring themes in autobiographical writing since the Romantic period, including the representation of childhood, the family, sexuality, gender, ethics, morality, and politics. (30 credits)

Primary Texts
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, Part 1 (Books 1-6)
Michel Leiris, Manhood
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Natalia Ginzburg, Family Sayings
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Jean-Paul Sartre, Words
Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence: A Memoir
Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood

Method of Assessment: One 5000-word essay; all students are also required to deliver one seminar presentation of 15-20 minutes.

FR855: Women Writers and the Family in Twentieth-Century Literature

In this module, we analyse a variety of fictional and theoretical texts to shed light on the practice of a number of European women writers. The introductory discussions explore seminal texts which have radically questioned the traditional role of women in given societies. While studying the set texts, we also consider related theoretical issues; for instance, to what extent is gender eclipsed by other issues in given texts? Principal topics for analysis include: incest, women's place in society, writing as a means of expressing one's identity in a patriarchal society, women joining the work force, lesbian relationships, filial relationships, colonial experience, class and cultural boundaries, demystification of official male models. The theme of the family serves to a varying extent as a framework for the discussion of such issues. (30 credits)

Primary Texts
Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin
Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina
Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It
Assia Djebar, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Esther Tusquets, Love is a Solitary Game
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Method of Assessement: One 5000-word essay; all students are also required to deliver one seminar presentation of 15-20 minutes.

FR857: European Tales of the Fantastic

Theoretical interest in the literary fantastic has developed rapidly over recent decades following the acclaimed seminal study by Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). In this module, we look at works by a range of European writers that fall within the category of the fantastic as established by Todorov. Topics to be considered will include: narrative unreliability, madness, magic, witchcraft, gender, and the uncanny. The seminar discussions on each author is enriched by a consideration of different branches of literary and psychoanalytic theory. (30 credits)

Preliminary Reading
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

Primary Texts
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities and Introduction to Fantastic Tales
Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love
Martin Gaite, The Back Room
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Guy de Maupassant, Selected Short Stories
Pier Paulo Pasolini, Petrolio
Patrick Süskind, Perfume

Method of Assessment: One 5000-word essay; all students are also required to deliver one seminar presentation of 15-20 minutes.

FR865: The Shifting Gaze: Cinematic Adaptations in Modern French Culture

This module seeks to explore how literary works are adapted and interpreted for the screen. It will address the manner in which film adaptations of literary texts function as cultural articulations of a nation. All of the films to be studied are based on a novel and will be analysed for the ways in which they quote, rework and come to terms with the literary text. Films to be studied include: Renoir's La Bête humaine, Bresson’s Les Dames au Bois de Boulogne, Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour and L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Chabrol’s Madame Bovary and Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé.

Method of Assessment: One 5000-word essay; all students are also required to deliver one seminar presentation of 15-20 minutes.

FR866: Literature and Theory

This module introduces students to a wide range of theoretical positions with the aim of enriching their understanding and appreciation of literature and critical practice. We begin by considering texts by Nietzsche and Freud, before going on to examine texts by Saussure, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss, Genette, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray. As well as encouraging a critical engagement with the claims of the theories themselves, the module examines a number of representative theoretical readings of literary works. Students learn to evaluate these various thinkers and use their ideas, as appropriate, in their own writing. (30 credits)

Primary Texts
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Sections 1-15)
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Theodor Adorno, The Essay as Form
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar on "The Purloined Letter"
Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Roland Barthes, The Reality Effect
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

Method of Assessment: One seminar presentation of 15-20 minutes and one 5000-word essay.

FR869: Varieties of Artifice: The Painting in the Text

This module examines the ways in which certain French writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seek to populate their texts with ekphrastic or quasi-ekphrastic descriptions of works of art, particularly paintings. The enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot was the first major French author to write in depth about painting, and he founded a new literary genre, the ‘Salon’. This was developed by later writers such as Baudelaire. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twenty first century, the mutual influence of literature and the visual arts continues to be a major theme of French culture, and has remained an important area of research.

Primary Texts
Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767 (extracts)
Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu
J.-K. Huysmans, A rebours
Assia Djebar, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit
Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Chapter 1)
Gilles Deleuze, Logique de la sensation

Method of Assessment: One seminar presentation of 15-20 minutes and one 5000-word essay.

FR870: Through a Lens: Photography in the Text

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has played a crucial role in the works of certain major French authors. This module will explore the various literary guises of photography in the twentieth century, and consider a variety of theoretical approaches to the photograph. Students will be encouraged to examine how the study of literary texts can be illuminated by photographic discourse – the extent to which the mimetic powers of the photograph and of the text are comparable.

Primary Texts
Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Marguerite Duras, L’Amant
Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (extracts)
Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Jalousie
Marie N Diaye, En famille
Hervé Guibert, L’Image fantôme
Patrick Modiano, Des inconnues

Method of Assessment: One seminar presentation of 15-20 minutes and one 5000-word essay.

French, School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF

Enquiries: +44 (0)1227 827159 or email French

Last Updated: 27/09/2011